Steve Blank

Steve Blank (born 1953) is a Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur and academician who developed the Customer Development methodology that launched the Lean Startup movement. He authored The Four Steps to the Epiphany and The Startup Owner’s Manual to describe how to build a successful company.

When I was young, I learned a quote in Sunday school that has stayed with me throughout my life. It said, 'teach us to number our days that we gain a heart of wisdom.' * Most of us will wake up 28,762 days- and then one day - we won’t. That means you have about 21,000 days left - and about 14,000 of them for your career. So herein lies the urgency.

Mentorship is a two-way street. While I was learning from them [brilliant mentors] - and their years of experience and expertise - what I was giving back was equally important. I brought fresh insights and new perspectives to their thinking.

Number one is "Do you have curiosity?" Number two is "Does it translate to imagination?" But number three is "Did it translate to action?" That’s the difference between someone with an idea and someone who is an entrepreneur.

A startup is in reality a 'faith-based enterprise' on day one. To turn the vision into reality and the faith into facts (and a profitable company), a startup must test those guesses, or hypotheses, and find out which are correct.

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Money is the lifeblood of startups. You stay in business until you run out of it.

Great entrepreneurs are revolutionaries. They speak truth to power. They change the status quo. They rebel against what exists. If you want to see what country will create the next Steve Jobs or Elon Musk, see how they treat their dissidents.

The Silicon Valley entrepreneurial culture used to be limited to a few entrepreneurial clusters. Now the Internet has spread that culture everywhere.

There are several generations of Silicon Valley CEOs who "pay-it-forward." It’s an understood, underground thing you don’t talk about. You give back to younger founders and entrepreneurs without asking for anything. The goal is to pass on what we learned to make our startup ecosystem better.

The #1 change in Silicon Valley is information density. If you think about it, 30 years ago the only way you got info was during one-on-one meetings. You knew very little and the world knew very little. We just know a lot more now.

The Silicon Valley culture is "I can win and you can win" - it isn't a sum-zero game.

I’ve watched how, in a blink of an eye, technology went from products used by the very few, to ending up in the pockets of billions, bringing social change and corporate disruption.

Only a few generations have been granted the role of determining whether a revolution in communication will allow our better angels – or our darker angels – to win. You leave here with incredible opportunity, but also with immense responsibility.

Your brains have been rewired to process all this Net-based information. Your brains are dealing with the world in a different way than humans ever have. That kind of profound shift has occurred only six times in the entire 200,000-year history of Homo Sapiens. And you, here today, are the vanguard of the seventh wave

Discussing the seven waves (the invention of speech, the written word, the printing press, newspapers, radio, television, and Internet)

Will you let darker angels win as you add fire to the flame, or will you seek out and spread real news?

The question is whether you'll tell your children that this decade was the beginning of a new dark age, or whether it was the time of something new and wonderful.